He borrowed a fresh sword, and went back to his work, again carefully closing the door behind him. After a while he re-emerged once more with a broken blade, and, arming himself afresh, returned a third time to his dreadful business. It was dark when the five men—all alike now with reddened garments—came out and locked the door behind them, leaving that great company of wives and mothers and little children in the slaughter-house. The men had done their work but roughly, and all through the night, though no cry was heard in the Bebeeghur, yet sounds, as if sighs from dying lips, and the rustle as of struggling bodies, seemed to creep out into the darkness incessantly through its sullen windows and hard-shut doors.
At eight o’clock the next morning the five men returned, attended by a few sweepers. They opened the door, and commenced to drag the nearer bodies, by their long tresses of hair, across the courtyard to the fatal well, hard by. Then, amongst the bodies lying prone over all the floor, there was a sudden stir of living things. Were the dead coming back to life?
Native evidence, collected afterwards, reports that a few children and nearly a dozen women had contrived to escape death by hiding under the bodies of the slain. They had lain in that dreadful concealment all night, but when the five returned they crept out with pitiful cries. Some of these were slain without parley; some ran like hunted animals round the courtyard, and then threw themselves down the well. One by one the victims were dragged out, stripped, and, many of them yet living, were flung into that dreadful grave.
One native witness, quoted by Trevelyan, says, “There was a great crowd looking on; they were standing along the walls of the compound. They were principally city people and villagers. Yes, there were also Sepoys. Three boys were alive. They were fair children. The eldest, I think, must have been six or seven, and the youngest five years. They were running round the well (where else could they go to?), and there was none to save them. No, none said a word, or tried to save them.” The youngest of these children, a tender little fellow, lunatic with terror, broke loose and ran like a hare across the courtyard. He was captured by an unsympathetic spectator, brought back, and flung down the well.
It was two days after this, on July 17, that three men of the 78th entered the court, for Havelock was now in possession of Cawnpore, and the Nana was a fugitive. The whispers and gestures of the natives drew their attention to the shut door of the bungalow. One of the Highlanders pushed open the door and stepped inside. “The next moment,” to quote Archibald Forbes, “he came rushing out, his face ghastly, his hands working convulsively, his whole aspect, as he strove in vain to gasp out some articulate sounds, showing that he had seen some dreadful sight.” No living thing was in the place; but the matting that covered the floor was one great sponge of blood, and he who had crossed it found himself, to borrow Burns’s phrase, “red wat shod.”
Little pools of blood filled up each inequality in the rough floor. It was strewn with pitiful relics, broken combs, pinafores, children’s shoes, little hats, the leaves of books, fragments of letters. The plastered wall was hacked with sword-cuts, “not high up, as where men had fought, but low down and about the corners, as if a creature had crouched to avoid a blow.” Long locks of hair were strewn about, severed, but not with scissors.
There were no inscriptions on the walls, but many a pitiful record upon the scattered papers on the floor. A few childish curls marked “Ned’s hair, with love;” the fly-leaf of a Bible, with a loving inscription—giver and recipient now both dead; a prayer-book, pages splashed red where once praying eyes had lingered. The pages of one grimly appropriate book—Drelincourt’s “Preparation for Death”—were scattered over the whole floor.
To write this story is a distress, to read it must be well-nigh an anguish. Yet we may well endure to know what our countrymen and countrywomen have suffered. Their sufferings are part of the price at which a great empire has been built.
Into what a passion of fury—half generous, half devilish—the soldiers who looked on these things were kindled may well be imagined. It will be remembered that Neill compelled some of the Sepoys captured at Cawnpore, and guilty of a share in this tragedy—high-caste Brahmins—to clean up, under the whip, a few square inches of the blood-stained floor, and then immediately hanged them, burying them in a ditch afterwards. These Brahmins, that is, were first ceremonially defiled, and then executed. That was an inhumanity unworthy of the English name, which Lord Clyde promptly forbade.
Nana Sahib had fled the palace. Principality, and power, and wealth, all had vanished. He was, like Cain, a fugitive on the face of the earth. In what disguises he hid himself, through what remote and lonely regions he wandered, where he died, or how, no man knows. His name has become an execration, his memory a horror.